


Catullus Spinning in his Grave

by misura



Category: Horrible Histories, Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans (2019)
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, Canon - Movie, F/M, Historical Inaccuracy, Love Confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:07:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: In hindsight, Atti definitely should have said it with flowers.
Relationships: Atti/Orla (Horrible Histories)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Catullus Spinning in his Grave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Verecunda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verecunda/gifts).



"I uh, I wrote a poem to tell you about my feelings," Atti said. He'd brought the scroll, he'd combed his hair (twice!) and he'd checked the fold of his toga, to make it sure it said 'I am a respectable single bachelor with full Roman citizenship' rather than 'I am a hopeless klutz who is probably not married to three women and a goat'. 

He'd considered also wearing his lucky/unlucky sandals for the occasion, only sandals really weren't made for the British climate.

Orla scoffed. Orla was wonderful and strong and brave and people kept telling him that a girl like Orla wasn't going to wait around forever, which Atti figured was all a matter of how you read your sundial, because it turned out that 'this is Britain, we _have_ no sun' hadn't been a joke, actually.

Not that Atti wouldn't have happily traded all the sun in the world for Orla. Because in addition to being wonderful and strong and brave, Orla was also warm and friendly and just great.

Atti wasn't entirely sure if she was also an appreciator of poetry, but since he'd already said alpha, he figured now he might as well say beta.

"Look," he said, holding out the scroll, "just read it, all right? Because to be honest, I'm kind of nervous and it took me a lot of tries to get it right, so. So I'd as soon get it over with. You can laugh," he added, though he hoped to Aphrodi- uh, Venus that she wouldn't. "I won't be hurt." He would be devastated and probably exile himself to faraway, miserable, sun-soaked Rome.

Orla scoffed again. Atti thought they'd moved past the scoffing stage in their relationship, but apparently, he'd been wrong. "Uh, hello, Celtic warrior woman here? I can't read, remember?"

"Oh." All right, so he'd failed at one tiny detail. "Well. That's a bummer. Never mind then." Maybe this was Venus's way of telling him 'no way, buddy: a girl like that - you don't stand a chance'.

"Hey!" Orla punched him in the shoulder. "Don't be such a quitter. You can read it to me, right?"

Atti considered claiming he'd forgotten, only he didn't think she'd buy that. "Uh."

"Go on then," Orla said. "I'm curious."

"Well," Atti said.

Orla snagged the scroll and started unrolling it. And unrolling it. And unrolling it. And then it bumped into Dougal's table, which should not be standing in the middle of the road, though Atti supposed it was fair enough to put a table in the middle of your living room, so eh. "Whoa. That's a lot of feelings."

Atti got down on one knee and declared, "Yes, because I have a lot of feelings for you, Orla, who shines brighter and warmer than the sun itself, except not really, because then everyone in this village would be blind and burnt to a crisp, so that's just as well, probably," and then Orla took his hand and said, "Oh, Atti, and you are like rain, except that you are refreshing and fun, not cold and miserable, and let's sing a slushy song about how we didn't realize we were in love with another until this very moment," and it would be so perfect that Atti wouldn't even point out that uh, he'd definitely realized.

Meanwhile, in the real world where that didn't happen, Atti said, "Ah," because he didn't think they'd had that syllable yet.

Dougal brought the scroll back, grumbling about 'young people these days', giving Atti some extra time to come up with a clever plan to get himself out of this.

"Well? I'm waiting," Orla said, sounding pretty bossy.

Atti thought he'd quite like to be bossed around for the rest of his life, so long as it was Orla doing the bossing around, not his parents, who were all, 'so why haven't you settled down with a nice, local girl yet? you're not getting any younger, you know' like, Atti didn't _want_ a nice, local girl, all right?

He wanted Orla. His parents would never understand. His parents were _the worst_ , and if Atti hadn't moved to the other side of the Empire already, he would have done it just to get away from them and their 'well, Dexterius from next door got together with that nice girl he met in Germany after she and her brothers ambushed him during a patrol - so romantic!'.

Atti started rewinding his scroll.

Orla frowned at him and said, "Anyway, why do you need _poetry_? I thought we were mates. Mates don't need poetry to talk about their feelings. They can just talk. About their feelings."

"It's complicated," Atti said. Alternate universe Atti had probably finished singing by now and might this very moment be kissing alternate universe Orla. Who wasn't the real Orla, and therefore Atti wasn't at all jealous. "It's - poetry can be used to express feelings that can't be put into words."

Orla snickered.

"It can!" Atti insisted. "Rome's produced some great poetry. Like - well, there's loads."

"But poetry's words, too," Orla said. "So saying poetry's for something you can't put into words is total rubbish. Queue. Eeh. Eff. Ha! And anyway, I bet you all nicked it."

"It's called 'plagiarism' when you do it with writing, and no, we didn't." Atti made a mental to scrap a few passages which might (might!) be considered derivative.

Not that Orla would recognize what they were derivative of, but better safe than sorry.

"And PS it's QED, not QEF. PS means after-I-said-it. Well, technically it means after-I-wrote-it. And - " Atti looked at his hands. They were empty. As in: scroll-less.

"Look at this scroll I've had forever," Brenda said. "It's got words and everything."

"That's - can I have that?" Atti asked, swallowing the 'back', because it so wasn't going to help his case.

"Why? You got plenty scrolls of your own, don't you?" Brenda said. "I tell you, maybe if you spent a little less time with your scrolls and a little more time out in the real world, you might've had a girlfriend by now. Scrolls! When I was young, we didn't have _scrolls_. We made up our own fun, and that was plenty good enough for us."

"Gran," Orla said.

"Oh, hey, Orla, didn't see you there," Brenda said, handing over Atti's scroll, easy as you please. "You should tell your young man to spend less time with his scrolls and more time getting things done. Handsome, clever lad like that, I bet you there's plenty of young ladies wouldn't mind getting a taste."

"I ... " Atti said. "Thank you? For the scroll, I meant."

Brenda gave him a look suggesting he was neither handsome nor the least bit clever. "Just you remember what I said."

"Yes, thank you. Again," Atti said, double-checking to make sure he still had the scroll as Brenda wandered off, still muttering about scrolls. "Um, look, Orla, sometimes there are things which are just ... hard to get right. So I wrote them down to make sure I wouldn't get it wrong. Because you're right: we're mates, and you're my best friend, and I wouldn't want to mess that up for anything."

Orla gave him a look also suggesting he was neither handsome nor clever, but that she liked him anyway, and would put him with him for a length of time impossible to measure by sundial, and not _just_ because Britain didn't get any sun ever. "All right. Hit me."

"Uh," Atti said, remembering several disastrous afternoons spent in 'combat training'. Orla had seemed to be having a good time, at least. Atti'd mostly gotten bruises - and all right, maybe he'd had a bit of fun, too, because when was spending time with Orla ever not fun?

Orla gestured impatiently. "Read!"

"Right. Right!" Atti stared at the top of the scroll. It said, 'dear Orla, I love you. I realize that maybe you don't love me back, and that's all right. I just wanted you to know how I feel, which is that you are the most wonderful, bravest, most beautiful person I know, and there's nobody else I would want to spend half as much time with as I want to spend with you. and when I say 'time', what I mean is - '.

"Today?" Orla said. She really was pretty bossy. And pretty. And bossy.

"Orla, I - " Atti swallowed. "You're really great. That's all." He started to put away the scroll, then realized he had nowhere to put it, so he ended up just sort of discreetly dropping it on the ground.

"That doesn't even rhyme!" Orla said. "How is that poetry? And it's so short!"

"It uh, I translated it for you because I wrote it in Latin. It totally rhymes in Latin. And it's epic long. Like - like the Aeneid!" Atti said. "It's this super-long poem about someone taking twenty years to get home after fighting in a war. But he gets there in the end, and then he kills, like, a bunch of people for not letting his wife finish her weaving by sneaking into her room at night and unraveling the whole thing, so that she has to start all over again the next day, and see, I just told you what happened really quick while if I'd read you the actual poem, it would've taken all day."

"Who would want to listen to poetry for a whole day?" Orla asked.

"Uh, sorry, I meant the Odyssey, not the Aeneid. We uh, we nicked that. Kind of. Little bit. But anyway, I think you're great and I wanted you to know," Atti said.

"Well. I think you're okay, too," Orla said, then frowned. "Wait, is that another thing you stole?"

"OK? I don't think so," Atti said. "Though I don't know what it actually means. The letters, that is."

"All right," Orla said.

"So. I think you're great and you think I'm great, too," Atti said.

"I didn't say 'great'." Orla smiled. "But yeah, fine. I guess I do think you're pretty cute. For a Roman."

"Great," Atti said. He wondered if something was supposed to happen now. The scrolls all made it sound so easy: confess your feelings, and there, all done! The end!

(Guys, guys, hold the credits! On-going story over here! So can we just - oh yes, that's lovely, thanks.)

(Annnd, we're back.)

"So my dad keeps asking me if I've found a nice Roman boy to settle down with yet," Orla said.

Atti groaned. Normally, he'd be happy to point out that actually, plenty of Romans were plenty nice, but ... "Are you kidding me? My parents are exactly the same! Well, I mean, they want me to settle down with a nice Celtic girl, not a nice Roman boy, because I like girls, not boys - or well, one girl."

Orla frowned at him. "There's a girl you like? How come I don't know about that?"

"Uh," Atti said.

"Like, 'like' like?" Orla asked.

"You just said 'like' three times in a row, and since you guys don't have cases, I have no idea what you just said. See? This is why Latin is such a great language. Trust me, a hundred - no, a thousand years from now, people will still be speaking Latin, because it's the best language ever," Atti said.

"Whatever," Orla said. "You know what, I think we should show our parents we can make up our own minds about who we want to settle down with. What do you say? You in?" She grinned and held out her hand.

Atti took it, mostly because he'd never not take Orla's hand if given the chance. "You bet."

Orla pulled him closer for a hug. It was a very nice hug. Orla was warm and strong and smelled like a Celtic warrior woman, and Atti's parents were idiots if they thought he'd be happy with anyone else.

"Orla, I really, really like you," Atti said. "You're the best."

Orla smiled at him and said, "All right, then you're the second-best."

And then someone started chanting 'kiss! kiss! kiss!' and Atti looked at Orla and Orla looked right back at him, and Atti figured that, well, maybe this crowd that seemed to have gathered around them all of a sudden might have the right idea here, because this was Love, this was Poetry, this was -

THE (HAPPY) END

(Roll credits!)


End file.
